Chapin: Three takeaways from Romney’s selection of Ryan as VP

Editor’s note:We asked our Battleground Colorado panelists to provide takeaways from Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate for voters in the state.

The three takeaways for Colorado:

1) Mitt Romney is still shoring up his base in Colorado and the rest of the country.

Until recently, Romney had only been appearing in solidly red parts of Colorado and avoiding suburban Denver like a summer cold. Just as John McCain picked Sarah Palin to shore up his base in 2008, Romney is hoping Paul Ryan will do the same in 2012.

Here’s the problem for Romney and Ryan: a third of the Colorado electorate is independents, and there are 114,000 more women voters than men in Colorado. The Ryan pick hurts with both those groups. Base candidates can’t win statewide, as Republicans have found for the last decade.

2) It means Romney-Ryan can’t tap dance around the personhood issue.

Ryan has co-sponsored federal legislation giving full legal rights to fertilized eggs, mirroring the two ‘personhood’ ballot measure that have failed by landslide margins in Colorado and is back on in 2012.
It also places Republican federal and state candidates in a bind. Republican Congressional candidates spent most of last week flipflopping, but when the top of the Republican ticket embraces personhood, they own it.

Personhood is in Colorado what Medicare is in Florida — a toxic issue with key constituencies, in our case suburban women and unaffiliated voters. According to a May Project New America poll of likely Colorado voters, only 30% support personhood. Personhood is even less popular among unaffiliated voters, who oppose the measure 65% to 27%. Among unaffiliated voters, 47% say they’d be more likely to vote for a candidate who opposes the measure. Just 19% say they’d be more likely to vote for one who supports it.

The Ryan budget shreds the social safety net and aid to the states for everything from education to transportation to national parks. More specifically, in addition to reviving failed trickle-down economics and turning Medicare into a voucher program, the Ryan budget guts federal support for forest protection and wildfire prevention. Since 2010, Republicans have cut the federal firefighting budget by more than $200 million, and the devastating domestic cuts in the Ryan budget would accelerate that process at the Federal Emergency Management Association (FEMA), Service, and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).